Departmental News

Posted:  Sep 23, 2021 - 12:00pm

In a paper titled The Community at the Crossroads: Artiodactyl Exploitation and Socio-environmental Connectivity at Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581) recently published in KIVA, Journal of Southwestern Anthropology and History, a team from The University of New Mexico discusses the results from their analysis of the artiodactyl fauna from Tijeras Pueblo, focusing on what these data suggest about socio-environmental connectivity. The research presented in the Community at the Crossroads paper is part of a larger special issue of Kiva that focuses on Tijeras.

UNM anthropology department associate professor Emily Jones, the primary investigator of the research, explained that artiodactyls are members of the order Artiodactyla - even-toed hoofed animals, including bighorn sheep, deer, buffalo, elk, and pronghorn antelope. In the central New Mexico region, these animals were important parts of the meat component of the diet. Finding lots of them in an archaeological fauna tends to indicate that people were well-off for food – though there are exceptions to that rule.

Jones noted that all the authors on this paper are UNM-affiliated. Scott Kirk and Cyler Conrad are recent UNM Archaeology Ph.D.s currently affiliated with UNM as adjunct assistant professors. Caitlin Ainsworth, Asia Alsgaard, and Jana Meyer are all students in the UNM archaeology Ph.D. program. As the PI, Jones worked with all the co-authors to analyze the animal remains from Tijeras. Read more